I think this is really cool. You can see where this kind of location awareness could be used in automobiles to prevent collisions (assuming you take the human out of the loop, ala I Robot). You can also look a little further down the road (depending on where our government heads), and see these things being deployed against citizens for various reasons, good and bad.
From The Blaze:
If the soldier-like perfection of the synchronized formation by these mini drones doesn’t freak you out a bit — their collective buzzing sure will.
Orchestrated by the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, these 20 “nano quadrotors” developed by KMel Robotics seem to, as Popular Science describes, sense each other’s proximityand work together to maintain formation “like a hive of bees moving en masse.”
Watch the drone swarm in varying formations and with obstacles (Note: Hold out for the figure eight at 1:27):
